I recommend starting with Stretch for development projects. Stretch Lite doesn't include the build tools that most projects require. It's easier to just start with them in place rather than spend a lot of time installing things.
Download the latest Raspbian image from https://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads/raspbian/.
Insert your SD card and determine where it's mounted.
diskutil list
Find the one that matches your SD card and unmount it.
diskutil unmountDisk [path to disk, e.g. "/dev/disk2"]
Burn the image to your SD card. This can take several minutes.
sudo dd bs=1m if=[path to img file, e.g. "2017-08-16-raspbian-stretch.img"] of=[path to rdisk, e.g. "/dev/rdisk2"] conv=sync
Ensure the disk is mounted again, then enable SSH.
touch /Volumes/boot/ssh
touch /Volumes/boot/wpa_supplicant.conf
Eject your SD card.
diskutil eject [path to disk]
Connect the Raspberry Pi to your Mac via an ethernet cable and turn on internet sharing to ethernet.
Copy your public SSH key the the Pi.
cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub | ssh [email protected] "mkdir -p ~/.ssh && cat >> ~/.ssh/authorized_keys"
# From https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-configure-ssh-key-based-authentication-on-a-linux-server
Then set up basic configuration.
ssh [email protected]
sudo raspi-config
Awesome, thanks for sharing :)